It is wrong to try to sanitize our icons in order to make sure all of the facts about them fit the saccharine narrative we want to remember.

Kent Bush

Heroes aren't always heroic.

It is wrong to try to sanitize our icons in order to make sure all of the facts about them fit the saccharine narrative we want to remember.

No one talks about Thomas Jefferson owning and possibly fathering children with slaves. That doesn't feel good that the man who wrote "all men are created equal" actually owned and probably abused "people" who weren't free at all.

Everyone loves John F. Kennedy now. We all like to quote, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." We love his vision to get our space program to the moon.

But fewer of us want to talk about the other side of the JFK coin that included serial infidelity and constant medication for chronic pain.

We can't accept people for who they were or who they are. We have to have heroes who are somehow superhuman in virility, vitality and virtue.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is an incredible example of that condition.

As we celebrate the impact King had on the civil rights movement and our society as a whole, we hear a lot about his dream, how he had been to the mountaintop and even his letter from a Birmingham, Ala., jail.

But how many will remember his frailties and failures? He was just a man like any of us. He had many strengths. But he wasn't perfect.

His life is proof that perfection isn't required to affect significant change in society.

You will be hard-pressed to find a member of the media willing to speak harshly about the legacy of King.

That is as it should be. But that wasn't always the case.

King gave one speech in particular that lost him a lot of friends.

Exactly one year before an assassin's bullet ended his life, King gave a speech titled, "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence."

King had begun to feel the weight of standing against the cultural current of both racial bigotry and pseudo-patriotic support of the war in Vietnam.

He knew that responses like that of the Washington Post were coming, but he spoke anyway.

"Why are you speaking about war, Dr. King? Why are you joining the voices of dissent? Peace and civil rights don't mix, they say. Aren't you hurting the cause of your people, they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern," he said. "I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling."

King said his main opposition to the war was the diversion of funds from programs for the poor that were helping to improve the fate of those who had been held back by a racist society.

"I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube," he said.

But this is also the speech that moved him up on the list of possible communist sympathizers and got is phones tapped and activities monitored by the FBI.

King noted that America was a strange liberator for the French colony of Vietnam because we had failed to recognize their liberated government and had added military muscle and funding when the French grew tired of the war on their own behalf.

He played devil's advocate on behalf of the communist government in North Korea a little too well for the tastes of the media and political establishment watching its sons and daughters fighting a horrifying war in southeast Asia.

King made it clear that he supported the soldiers and didn't want to hurt them, but he believed America needed to examine its own motives.

"The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve," he said. "It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways."

King was far from the only person — civil rights leader or otherwise — who had strong and varied opposition to the war in Vietnam.

Thankfully, history has remembered King more for the good work he did on civil rights than crossing swords with the Johnson administration on foreign policy.

We should aspire to make King's dream a reality. We should learn from the man who has been to the mountaintop and seen the promised land.

But we can also learn from the resolve even when his positions weren't as popular.

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